MEMORIES OF SUMMER ON LAKE RIPLEY CAN`T CROSS GENERATION GAP

Douglas BalzCHICAGO TRIBUNE

It had been 10 years since I`d been back to Mrs. Schmidt`s. No. Longer than that. Twenty years, at least, probably about 25. Twenty-five years since my brother and I hopped in the back of the family car for a week`s stay at Mrs. Schmidt`s.

In the years that followed, I lived in four states and the District of Columbia, spent a summer traveling around Europe and visited New York often enough that its streets no longer seemed strange. As a kid, I camped in Colorado, ate pralines in New Orleans and rode in a fringed surrey on Mackinac Island. But when I think of Summer Vacation, I think of Mrs. Schmidt`s.

It`s real name was Maple Villa, but it was really just a big house

--probably the summer home of some Midwest entrepreneur--perched on the crest of a broad green lawn that rolled down to the shore of Lake Ripley in southern Wisconsin.

Our family went to Lake Ripley almost every summer when I was growing up. The first year we stayed someplace else, but the second summer we stayed at Mrs. Schmidt`s and that`s where we stayed every time we went back. Most years, we spent a week or two there in June or July and made it back for the long Labor Day weekend.

Maple Villa was a resort, but by today`s standards, its facilities were meager. For starters, the place didn`t even have a pool. Sure, there was all of Lake Ripley just outside the door, but even oceanside resorts have pools these days. No tennis courts, either. No golf course. No miniature golf. No horses. No game room. No sauna or whirlpools or exercise rooms. No room service. No cocktail lounge. No restaurant. (There was a dining room, but that was where Mrs. Schmidt and her family ate.) Maple Villa didn`t even have a TV set.

It had the lake, of course, a small dock, one old rowboat (oars free;

motors you had to rent) and a raft, bobbing in the water about 50 feet from shore.

The ''villa'' itself was furnished in the same spartan style. It`s most memorable feature was a screened-in porch that wrapped around three sides of the building and was outfitted with two porch swings.

We swam when the weather was good. When it wasn`t, we read comic books on the front porch or played card games by the fireplace in the living room. Some days we just lay on the raft, or floated in an inner tube and swatted at the horseflies or horsed around in the rowboat. If we were lucky, one of the guest would clamp their outboard motor on the back of the boat and take us for a ride. In the diminished scale of delights at Maple Villa, a slow chug around the lake in the row boat was a real treat.

But what a comfortable place Maple Villa was each summer. After our first few visits, we were treated not as ''guests'' but as members of the family, and we came to think of Maple Villa not as a resort but as a home away from home. It may not have been fancy, but in some small way, it was ''ours.''

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Directly across the lake from where we stayed was a place called Alpine Village. In the eyes of a child, Alpine Village was a real resort. It had cabins scattered through several acres of trees. It had a restaurant and a soda fountain. At night, the grounds twinkled with the light from dozens of small amber bulbs, and I can remember sitting on the dock at Maple Villa, staring at the lights and savoring the thought that in a day or two, we would make our annual pilgrimage to Alpine Village.

I think it was the beer steins that did it. There were a couple dozen of them, lined up on the counter behind the soda fountain. They were the genuine article: imported from Switzerland and Germany, decorated with sheepherders and chalets and snow-covered alps. Never in my life had I seen anything so exotic, so foreign, and their presence lent an air of mystery to the small Wisconsin resort.

All of these thoughts passed through my mind as I swung off the main road leading out of Cambridge, Wis., and made the familiar left turn at the mink ranch onto the road that circled the lake. The day`s drive had begun at the Wisconsin Dells, where we had taken my two daughters, and would end at Six Flags over Great America, one of the ubiquitous theme parks that dot the country now. On impulse, I had decided to make this brief detour into the past.

Already, I had seen a few changes. A Cambridge garage had become a pottery shop and the Cottage Restaurant (where my mother amazed us by having pecan pie for breakfast!) was now a Hallmark Card store, and no one on the street could remember there being a restaurant in that spot. What had the years done to the resorts of Lake Ripley?

Alpine Village had gone condo. The little soda shop was still there, badly in need of paint and looking a little forlorn by the water`s edge. It seemed smaller, too, but everything seemed smaller this time. The beaches were skimpier, the houses along the lake not quite as grand as I remembered them and even the lake, which once stretched away to the horizon from the Maple Villa dock, seemed to have contracted over the years.

''Why are we stopping here, daddy?'' Annie said as we pulled into Mrs. Schmidt`s driveway. And who could blame her for wondering? Nobody she knew lived there. Nobody that I knew lived there either. Mrs. Schmidt had sold it several years before and the new owners, I noticed with some satisfaction, were making badly needed repairs to the place. The raft was gone but the dock --the same dinky dock--was there and so was the big wraparound porch, the only extravagant note that remained. Otherwise, it was just a big old house.

I got out of the car to take a picture, but from the road, I could hardly see Maple Villa for the trees that now filled the front lawn.

There was so much I wanted to tell the girls--about amber lights and chocolate sodas and German steins. About how I grew up, wading farther and farther into this lake every summer. About how I was the last one out of the water on Labor Day every year, prolonging summer and postponing the start of school as long as I could. About how the real meaning of summer vacations isn`t measured in miles driven and sights seen.

Instead, I got in the car, backed out of the drive, and headed for Great America.